Blake Lively’s Preserve: Anti-GOOP

In its first year, 5% of the profits from Preserve, Blake Lively’s new lifestyle site, will go towards Covenant House. It was already established in her VOGUE cover story that Ryan Reynolds’s fingerprints would be “all over” her new enterprise. Reynolds has supported Covenant House Vancouver in the past – click here for details.

So that’s one way – and a good one – in which Preserve is different from GOOP.

But that actually seems to be the point of Preserve so far: to NOT be GOOP.

At least that’s how Blake’s first editor’s letter reads here. She went out of her way in her mission statement to talk about what Preserve isn’t. Right off the top, she tells you that she’s not an “arbiter” of anything.

So…what’s more palatable? Someone who tells you they know everything and better? Or someone who claims to know nothing and shows you everything?

“Blake is hipster to Gwyneth’s prep” is how Duana described it. But…that’s still the same family, non? The same family in which some items are only available in XS. Great.

Still, Blake told VOGUE that she knows about good writing. And Preserve is not only about the products but the stories behind them. So I decided to check out the “story” about barbecue. This is one of the passages:

“At once structured and chaotic, the great American BBQ is, indubitably, a rollicking repast. To create such a wicked wassail² demands, first and foremost, a cast of characters as colorful and damned as Dante ever envisioned.”

WHAT THE F-CK AM I READING?

Yesterday I wrote about how Leonardo DiCaprio is considered the smartest celebrity on Twitter because his tweets often involve words that are longer than 3 syllables. Click here for a refresher. This is who we are now. We consider good writing to be long words and alliteration. OVER alliteration. So, basically, if you’re an English major who thinks you can become David Foster Wallace simply by studying the thesaurus, Blake considers you to be a good writer. How else would ANYONE consider this to be an acceptable sentence???

“At once structured and chaotic, the great American BBQ is, indubitably, a rollicking repast. To create such a wicked wassail² demands, first and foremost, a cast of characters as colorful and damned as Dante ever envisioned.”

Enough with the “rollicking repasting” and the “wicked wassails”. This is all you need to say:

It’s a tradition, and sometimes a messy one, but the great American BBQ is, at heart, just a really fun meal. And the key to the great American BBQ? Simply surround yourself with your favourite people.

When you remove the creative writing asshole from the sentiment, that’s what remains: the story of BBQ. The end.

But, Jesus, the entire exercise is like this. Pages and pages of this kind of “storytelling”. And this? This is what we were told would be “never done before” and totally revolutionary?

Well now I’m mad at her. Because you know what she just did? She just made me say this: